welcome from Rosenheim, Bavaria. My first owned computer was the TI 99/4a. The cpu was the TMS 9900, the first 16 bit chip at a time when even 8088-PC's had an 8 bit chip. Pitifully, the 16 bit were only utilised inside the cpu, data exchange with memory and graphics etc. was done by only 8 bit.

Of course BASIC (TI EXTENDED BASIC) was my first experience with programming, later a c99-compiler (by Clint Pulley from the States) was my choice. My son and I had made a lap counter for CARRERA racing with joystick-micro-switches. But BASIC was too slow, when the cars reached the switch at the same (or almost same) time, BASIC counted only the lap of one car. c99 was the solution (an executable runtime file was the result of the compiler).
Then came TI-BASE (yet relational, but without index files). It came with an "interpreted" programming language very similar to dBase. So I learned to understand how databases work and on my PC at work I programmed some useful programs with dBase. The biggest project was a program to administer devices we give to our customers on a rental base.
And then 16 bit programs were abandoned by Microsoft. I could use XBase++ but only text oriented. Being used to @say,get, the GUI remained a mystery to me.
Last year I installed HMG 3.4.4 on my Computer. But if I hadn't joined HMG-Forum I would sure have given up.
This forum has helped me always and thanks to the help of the forum (I'd like to mention the help from your country fellow man Serge specially) I am able to program in HMG.

I hope these lines are not too boring.

I like HMG and as mentioned before the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.
Robert